I’ve been trading for more than six years now, with several of those years spent doing it full-time, and one thing I’ve gradually realized is how much the relationship you have with money can influence the decisions you make in the market. Obviously, we all start trading because we want to make money, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I certainly didn’t spend thousands of hours looking at charts because I was fascinated by candlesticks. I wanted to make a living doing something I enjoyed, have more freedom over my time and eventually build a financial situation where I wouldn’t have to worry too much about money.
But there’s something strange that happens when making money becomes something you feel you need to do rather than something you’re trying to achieve over time. You start approaching the market differently. A setup that you would normally ignore suddenly becomes interesting, a loss that you would usually accept becomes much harder to tolerate and an ordinary trading session where nothing happens starts feeling like a wasted opportunity.
I’ve experienced this myself, and I think it’s one of the more uncomfortable things to admit about trading because it means that sometimes the problem is everything you’ve attached to the money you’re hoping to make.
I. Why Desperation Makes You a Worse Trader
Imagine sitting down to trade knowing that you need to make $2,000 this month to cover your expenses. You’ve already had a relatively difficult few weeks, your account is slightly down and there are only a few trading sessions left before the end of the month. You open the charts, start looking for opportunities and naturally hope that something good appears because another profitable trade would make your financial situation much more comfortable.
Now imagine another trader looking at exactly the same chart, using exactly the same strategy, but with enough money saved to cover the next twelve months of expenses. They don’t particularly care whether they make anything today because their ability to pay rent or buy groceries doesn’t depend on what happens during this trading session.
Both traders have access to the same information, and technically both should make exactly the same decision. If the setup is valid, they should take it, and if there is nothing there, they should simply close the platform and continue with their day.
But I think we both know that the experience of sitting in front of those charts is going to be completely different.
The first trader is looking at the market through the lens of what they need it to provide, while the second trader can afford to look at what is actually happening. And when you desperately need something to happen, it becomes surprisingly difficult to evaluate whether it is genuinely likely to happen.
I’ve noticed this in my own trading whenever I became too attached to a particular result. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I immediately started breaking every rule I had, but the pressure was there in smaller ways. I would become more interested in setups that weren’t particularly attractive, think more about the potential profit than the actual quality of the opportunity and sometimes feel frustrated simply because the market wasn’t doing anything worth trading.
The ridiculous part is that none of my financial expectations had any influence on what the market was going to do. All of those things existed entirely inside my head, yet they could completely change how I experienced the exact same market conditions.
What is the worst about all of this is the reality that if you have money saved and go through the drawdown, taking money out of the emergency fond will suck as well - so probably there is no way being mentally OK when going through drawdown if you are full-time. That’s just reality. Only option I see that you have A LOT of capital, so you do not care at all. For me the 13-month savings did not work too much as well. First months were relatively OK, but then I started to dig deeper into the hole I was in.
II. Trading full-time makes this much more complicated
I think this is something people underestimate when they talk about becoming full-time traders. From the outside, it sounds like an incredible lifestyle, and in many ways it genuinely can be. You don’t have a boss telling you when to show up, you can organize your day however you want and theoretically you only need a few good decisions to make a living.
That’s the side you see on Instagram.
In reality, when trading becomes your primary source of income, the relationship you have with every trading result can change. A losing month is no longer just an unfortunate number in your performance journal; it can also mean that you need to cover your living expenses from savings. A period without good setups isn’t simply boring anymore because you’re also aware that another week has passed without producing any income.
And unlike a normal job, you can’t necessarily compensate for a difficult month by working harder. You can spend twice as much time looking at charts, wake up earlier, analyze more markets and put in more effort, but none of that guarantees that you’ll make more money. In fact, trying to force more opportunities out of the market can very easily make your results worse.
I think this is one of the strangest parts of trading professionally. In most jobs, there’s at least some relationship between how much work you do and how much you get paid. In trading, you can do your job perfectly for an entire week and finish with less money than you started with. You can also spend several days waiting, take absolutely no trades and have made the correct decision every single time.
That’s difficult enough when trading is something you do alongside another source of income. When your entire financial situation depends on it, accepting those periods becomes much harder, and I think that’s where a lot of otherwise capable traders start making decisions they would never make under less pressure.
III. When Working Harder Starts Working Against You
One of the habits I’ve had to work on throughout my trading career is the feeling that I should somehow be doing more when things aren’t going well. If I was experiencing a difficult period, my natural reaction was often to spend more time analyzing, reviewing my trades, thinking about what I could improve or looking for something that might explain why the results weren’t where I wanted them to be.
Sometimes that was useful because there genuinely was something worth improving, but other times I was simply uncomfortable with the fact that I couldn’t directly control how quickly the results would improve. I wanted to feel productive, and searching for another solution was much more comfortable than accepting that I might have to continue doing essentially the same thing for another few weeks without knowing when the next profitable period would arrive.
I remember going through an absolutely ridiculous streak of 36 consecutive losing trades. There were plenty of moments during that period when I questioned what I was doing, and understandably so, because losing that many times in a row is hardly an enjoyable experience. But what made it particularly difficult was the fact that I couldn’t simply decide to make the next trade profitable. I could review my execution, evaluate whether the strategy still made sense, manage my risk and make sure I wasn’t doing anything stupid, but I couldn’t force the market to produce a winner just because I felt I had waited long enough.
That experience taught me a lot about the difference between being responsible for my decisions and feeling responsible for every result. I can be responsible for showing up prepared, following my rules and managing the money I’m risking, but I can’t realistically demand that those decisions produce a particular amount of income by the end of the week.
And I think that distinction becomes especially important when you have bills to pay, financial goals to reach or people depending on you.
IV. The problem with having a daily profit target
I know plenty of traders like setting daily or weekly profit targets, and I understand why. Having a specific number gives you something to work toward, makes progress easier to measure and can create a sense of structure in an activity that otherwise feels quite uncertain.
Personally, though, I’ve never liked the idea of sitting down and deciding that I need to make a particular amount of money today.
Let’s say your target is $500 a day (speaking about $10k a month, I do not think that gurus even realise it's this number lmao). You open the charts, take a perfectly valid trade and lose $200. Now you’re not simply looking for the next opportunity; you’re also aware that you need to make $700 to reach the number you had in mind. Maybe you take another loss, and suddenly the amount you feel you need to recover becomes even larger.
The problem is that your daily target has absolutely no relationship with the quality or quantity of opportunities the market is offering. Some days there might be several excellent setups, while other days there might be nothing worth taking. You just can’t build your financial calendar around profits from the markets, and expecting it to pay you when you want to. It doesn’t work like that.
I’ve found it much more useful to focus on things that are actually within my control. I can decide when I’m going to trade, what conditions need to be present before I enter, how much I’m willing to risk and when I’m going to stop. I can’t decide how much money the market will give me during those hours and pretending otherwise usually leads to frustration.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have financial goals. Of course I do, and I think it’s important to know what you’re working toward. But I don’t want those goals sitting next to my buy and sell buttons, influencing decisions that should be based on the market rather than my personal expectations.
V. Sometimes the best thing you can do is make trading less important
This might sound strange coming from someone who has spent such a large part of his life trading, but I genuinely think one of the most useful things you can do for your trading is build a life where you don’t need trading to go well every single month.
I’m not talking about becoming less serious about it or treating it like some random hobby. I still take trading seriously, I still want to improve and I obviously want to make more money over time. But I don’t want every losing streak to feel like a threat to my entire financial situation, and I don’t want to wake up every morning knowing that I need the market to cooperate for my life to continue functioning normally.
For me, that means thinking about things outside trading as well. Having savings, building other sources of income, keeping my expenses reasonable and making sure that my entire sense of progress in life isn’t connected to what happened in US this morning. Those things might sound more like personal finance than trading psychology, but I think they’re closely connected.
If you know that you can comfortably survive several difficult months without needing to withdraw money from your trading account, you give yourself a very different environment in which to make decisions. Still stressful, but way more comfortable. You can afford to wait for the opportunities you actually want, accept losses without immediately needing to recover them and evaluate your strategy over a meaningful sample rather than judging it based on whether it paid your bills this month.
Of course, having savings will not make you profitable. You can have a million dollars in the bank and still trade like a complete idiot, but I think removing unnecessary financial pressure gives you a much better chance of making the decisions you already know you should be making.
And perhaps more importantly, it makes trading much more enjoyable. If you enjoy the pain - just joking.
VI. I still want to make a lot of money
I don’t want this newsletter to sound like I’ve somehow stopped caring about making money, because that would be complete bullshit. Making money is obviously one of the main reasons I trade, and I still have plenty of things I want to achieve financially. I want to grow my capital, continue improving and eventually reach a point where trading can provide even more freedom than it already has.
But there’s a difference between wanting something and needing it to happen right now.
When I want to make money, I can build a process that I believe gives me a reasonable chance of doing so over time. I can test it, manage my risk, evaluate the results and make adjustments when there’s actual evidence that something needs to change. When I desperately need to make money, however, the process can slowly become secondary to the outcome, and that’s when I start looking for ways to accelerate something that might not be possible to accelerate.
I think this is why trading can become such a frustrating experience for people who enter the market hoping it will solve their immediate financial problems. They might genuinely have the motivation to learn, work hard and improve, but they’re approaching an activity with uncertain short-term outcomes while needing a very specific short-term result.
That’s an incredibly difficult position to put yourself in.
After more than six years, I don’t think becoming a better trader has meant learning how to make the market give me more money whenever I want it. If anything, I’ve become much more comfortable accepting that there will be periods when the market gives me very little, regardless of how much I would prefer otherwise.
Some months will be profitable, some will be negative and sometimes I’ll spend weeks waiting for opportunities that never actually develop. I can review what I’m doing and make sure the process still makes sense, but I don’t want the amount of money I need or want to become the reason I start making decisions that I wouldn’t otherwise make.
Because whenever I’ve become too focused on what I needed the market to give me, I’ve usually ended up paying much less attention to what it was actually offering.
And in my experience, that’s a pretty reliable way to make trading much harder than it already is.
Bless you all.
Luke